Prevention Justice is a call to institutionalizing an effective HIV prevention approach that recognizes the structural factors that affect people's lives and put them at risk for HIV in the first place.

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Telling women to abstain or asking women to tell their partners to wear a condom is not enough to protect women from HIV. Women will be safe from HIV when the overall quality of our lives and the lives of our loved ones is uplifted and when we have a variety of ways to protect ourselves, including methods that don't require our partner's knowledge or consent.

In the U.S., most HIV-positive women are low-income women of color who face many layers of oppression and marginalization. Women's health is affected by the consequences of racism, sexism and homophobia -- including lack of access to well-paying jobs, inability to obtain quality women-centered health care, lack of safe and stable housing, gender-based violence, and inequitable development policies.

To address the HIV epidemic among women, we must change the way we do HIV prevention -- shifting from individual behavior to addressing broader social and structural issues.

Challenges

Test all women for HIV: The perception that women do not need HIV testing is dangerous to women's health -- leading to late testing and poor health outcomes.

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